Back when I was an undergrad I took a
class in Shakespeare. I'm mentioning this because a couple of aspects
came back to me recently while thinking about education. The first
was the format of the tests the teacher used. They consisted of a
list of quotes from the four plays we had covered since the last
test. Each quote had a pronoun underlined which came with a two part
question: who was the speaker and who was the antecedent?
I've never seen that format used in
another class (even by the same teacher) and I always thought it was
an interesting approach. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using it
widely but I'm glad I had it in at least one course. It was a method
that encouraged attentive reading (particularly useful with
Shakespeare).
Experiencing different styles of
teaching and evaluation are part of a well-rounded education. I've seen a wide range approaches. Some were successful. Some were not. Some successful as one-shots but weren't models I'd suggest routinely following, like the number theory class I took that didn't allow mathematical notation (all proofs had to be written out in grammatical sentences without abbreviations or symbols -- more or less the way Fermat would have done it). That pedagogical diversity has been of immense value.
A book on quality control I read a few years ago said that quality in a QC sense was equivalent to a lack of variation; quality meant all parts came out the same. Sometimes I'm afraid that the some in the education reform movement are starting to think of uniformity as an end to itself.
